ASTRONAUTS pulled off the first in a series of anticipated triumphs for astronomy yesterday as they installed a new £80 million camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope.
In a day-long excursion fraught with danger, Drew Feustel, 43, and John Grunsfeld, 50, performed a precarious space ballet 350 miles up to remove Hubble's old Wide Field Planetary Camera and slot in a replacement.
As they orbited Earth outside the
space shuttle Atlantis, the Sun rose and set in the background every 90 minutes. "Who turned out the light?" Mr Feustel joked at one point.
The task was among several on a "to-do" list covering five spacewalks. Successful installation of the camera will provide astronomers with a new eye on the universe, allowing them to peer further, and with greater precision, into space.
The camera leaves Hubble "ready to unlock the secrets of the universe," said astronaut Mike Massimino, 46, who helped choreograph the spacewalk from inside Atlantis. From outside, Mr Grunsfeld corrected him excitedly. "More of the secrets," he said.
The spacewalk combined moments of light-hearted exuberance with nailbiting tension as the astronauts worked through their tasks, with Mr Feustel at times perched at the end of a 50ft boom operated from inside Atlantis by Megan McArthur.
"Too cool," he said as he emerged from the shuttle's airlock to see the planet spread out below him.
The mood was soon more muted as, for more than 45 minutes, Mr Feustel wrestled to unlock a bolt on the camera's housing, which has not been touched since its installation in 1993.
After the bolt resisted subtle attempts to free it using power tools, the astronaut was granted permission from mission control to use brute strength as the potential consequences of failure sent jitters through Nasa.
"I want you to understand that if this breaks, Wide Field stays in," Mr Feustel warned, raising the prospect that the camera's $126m replacement would be brought back to Earth unused.
A dose of elbow grease later, the bolt was freed, allowing the two men to slide the piano-sized instrument from its berth and insert its successor. The old camera has taken 135,000 of Hubble's most iconic images, but has degraded over the years and has been gradually edging towards breakdown.
Hubble, which is owned by Nasa and the European Space Agency, has transformed astronomy, providing unprecedented views of the universe, including images of remote galaxies forming not long after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
The mission to fix it – which, if successful, will extend its life to at least 2014 – coincides with the International Year of Astronomy, marking the 400th anniversary of the first telescopic observations of space by Galileo Galilei.
